Conferencing environments, such as boardrooms, conferencing settings, and the like, can involve the use of microphones for capturing sound from audio sources and loudspeakers for presenting audio from a remote location (also known as a far end). For example, persons in a conference room may be conducting a conference call with persons at a remote location. Typically, speech and sound from the conference room may be captured by microphones and transmitted to the remote location, while speech and sound from the remote location may be received and played on loudspeakers in the conference room. Multiple microphones may be used in order to optimally capture the speech and sound in the conference room.
However, the microphones may pick up the speech and sound from the remote location that is played on the loudspeakers. In this situation, the audio transmitted to the remote location may therefore include an echo, i.e., the speech and sound from the conference room as well as the speech and sound from the remote location. If there is no correction, the audio transmitted to the remote location may therefore be low quality or unacceptable because of this echo. In particular, it would not be desirable for persons at the remote location to hear their own speech and sound.
Existing echo cancellation systems may utilize an acoustic echo canceller for each of the multiple microphones, and a mixer can subsequently mix and process each echo-cancelled microphone signal. However, these types of systems may be computationally intensive and complex. For example, separate and dedicated processing may be needed to perform acoustic echo cancellation on each microphone signal. Furthermore, a typical acoustic echo canceller placed after a mixer would work poorly due to the need to constantly readapt to the mixed signal generated by the mixer should the mixer be dynamic, i.e., the gains on one or more of the mixer channels changes over time.
Accordingly, there is an opportunity for acoustic echo cancellation systems and methods that address these concerns. More particularly, there is an opportunity for acoustic echo cancellation systems and methods that cancel and suppress acoustic echo and work with a mixer that has mixed the audio of multiple acoustic sources, while being computationally efficient and resource-friendly.